Characterizing how ecosystems are responding to rapid environmental change has become a major focus of ecological research. The empirical study of ecological stability, which aims to quantify these ...ecosystem responses, is therefore more relevant than ever.
Based on a historical review and bibliometric mapping of the field of ecological stability, we show that the two main schools relating to the study of stability—one focusing on systems close to their equilibrium and the other on non‐equilibrium behaviour—have developed in parallel leading to divergence in both concepts and definitions.
We synthesize and expand previous frameworks and capitalize on the latest developments in the field to build towards an integrated framework by elaborating the overarching concept of ecological stability and its properties. Finally, the broad applicability of our work is demonstrated in two empirical cases.
Synthesis. With rapidly changing environmental conditions, the stability of ecosystems has become a major focus of ecological research. Still, the concept of stability remains a major source of confusion and disagreement among ecologists. The conceptual framework presented here provides a basis to integrate currently diverging views on the study of ecological stability.
With rapidly changing environmental conditions, the stability of ecosystems has become a major focus of ecological research. Still, the concept of stability remains a major source of confusion and disagreement among ecologists. The conceptual framework presented here provides a basis to integrate currently diverging views on the study of ecological stability.
Data needed for macroecological analyses are difficult to compile and often hidden away in supplementary material under non-standardized formats. Phylogenies, range data, and trait data often use ...conflicting taxonomies and require ad hoc decisions to synonymize species or fill in large amounts of missing data. Furthermore, most available data sets ignore the large impact that humans have had on species ranges and diversity. Ignoring these impacts can lead to drastic differences in diversity patterns and estimates of the strength of biological rules. To help overcome these issues, we assembled PHYLACINE, The Phylogenetic Atlas of Mammal Macroecology. This taxonomically integrated platform contains phylogenies, range maps, trait data, and threat status for all 5,831 known mammal species that lived since the last interglacial (∼130,000 years ago until present). PHYLACINE is ready to use directly, as all taxonomy and metadata are consistent across the different types of data, and files are provided in easy-to-use formats. The atlas includes both maps of current species ranges and present natural ranges, which represent estimates of where species would live without anthropogenic pressures. Trait data include body mass and coarse measures of life habit and diet. Data gaps have been minimized through extensive literature searches and clearly labelled imputation of missing values. The PHYLACINE database will be archived here as well as hosted online so that users may easily contribute updates and corrections to continually improve the data. This database will be useful to any researcher who wishes to investigate large-scale ecological patterns. Previous versions of the database have already provided valuable information and have, for instance, shown that megafauna extinctions caused substantial changes in vegetation structure and nutrient transfer patterns across the globe.
• Premise of the study: Near-future climate changes are likely to elicit major vegetation changes. Disequilibrium dynamics, which occur when vegetation comes out of equilibrium with climate, are ...potentially a key facet of these. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for making accurate predictions, informing conservation planning, and understanding likely changes in ecosystem function on time scales relevant to society. However, many predictive studies have instead focused on equilibrium end-points with little consideration of the transient trajectories.• Methods: We review what we should expect in terms of disequilibrium vegetation dynamics over the next 50–200 yr, covering a broad range of research fields including paleoecology, macroecology, landscape ecology, vegetation science, plant ecology, invasion biology, global change biology, and ecosystem ecology.• Key results: The expected climate changes are likely to induce marked vegetation disequilibrium with climate at both leading and trailing edges, with leading-edge disequilibrium dynamics due to lags in migration at continental to landscape scales, in local population build-up and succession, in local evolutionary responses, and in ecosystem development, and trailing-edge disequilibrium dynamics involving delayed local extinctions and slow losses of ecosystem structural components. Interactions with habitat loss and invasive pests and pathogens are likely to further contribute to disequilibrium dynamics. Predictive modeling and climate-change experiments are increasingly representing disequilibrium dynamics, but with scope for improvement.• Conclusions: The likely pervasiveness and complexity of vegetation disequilibrium is a major challenge for forecasting ecological dynamics and, combined with the high ecological importance of vegetation, also constitutes a major challenge for future nature conservation.
Future of the human climate niche Kohler, Timothy A.; Lenton, Timothy M.; Svenning, Jens-Christian ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
05/2020, Letnik:
117, Številka:
21
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the ...same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation.
Aim
Connectivity among ecosystems is necessary to sustain ecological processes that promote biodiversity, community stability and ecosystem resilience, such as organism and nutrient dispersal. Along ...with human land use and habitat fragmentation, connectivity can also be affected by faunal changes. Here, we address this issue by studying how human‐driven late Quaternary extinctions and extirpations of terrestrial mammals have affected the movement capacity of assemblages, an estimate of the potential connectivity among ecosystems promoted by wildlife.
Location
Global.
Time period
Late Pleistocene to the Anthropocene.
Major taxa studied
All 4,395 (4,073 extant and 322 extinct) terrestrial mammals alive in the Late Pleistocene.
Methods
We combined macroecological estimates of home range size with range maps of current and natural geographical distributions of species to investigate how human pressure has modified natural movement capacity of terrestrial assemblages and how movement capacity will respond to future extinction and rewilding scenarios.
Results
Our results showed that 74% of average and 83% of maximum movement capacity of Late Pleistocene mammal assemblages has been lost owing to prehistorical and historical extinctions and extirpations. We also found that movement capacity will decrease further if current extinction trajectories are not averted. However, our results showed that current average and maximum movement capacity can be restored to twice their current values under a full rewilding scenario and that average, but not maximum movement capacity, will increase under a conservative rewilding scenario, that is, without restoring the largest megafauna most likely to cause major human–wildlife conflicts.
Main conclusions
Prehistorical and historical losses of megafauna have caused severe decreases in movement capacity of mammal assemblages, hence large reductions in ecosystem connectivity. Reintroductions can partly restore biotic connectivity, especially when the largest megafauna are also restored. However, natural levels of movement capacity cannot be recovered fully without including ecological replacements for extinct species in rewilding efforts.
Half of all plant species rely on animals to disperse their seeds. Seed dispersal interactions lost through defaunation and gained during novel community assembly influence whether plants can adapt ...to climate change through migration. We develop trait-based models to predict pairwise interactions and dispersal function for fleshy-fruited plants globally. Using interactions with introduced species as an observable proxy for interactions in future novel seed dispersal networks, we find strong potential to forecast their assembly and functioning. We conservatively estimate that mammal and bird defaunation has already reduced the capacity of plants to track climate change by 60% globally. This strong reduction in the ability of plants to adapt to climate change through range shifts shows a synergy between defaunation and climate change that undermines vegetation resilience.
The incipient sixth mass extinction that started in the Late Pleistocene has already erased over 300 mammal species and, with them, more than 2.5 billion y of unique evolutionary history. At the ...global scale, this lost phylogenetic diversity (PD) can only be restored with time as lineages evolve and create new evolutionary history. Given the increasing rate of extinctions however, can mammals evolve fast enough to recover their lost PD on a human time scale? We use a birth–death tree framework to show that even if extinction rates slow to preanthropogenic background levels, recovery of lost PD will likely take millions of years. These findings emphasize the severity of the potential sixth mass extinction and the need to avoid the loss of unique evolutionary history now.
Sustaining wildlife populations, which provide both ecosystem services and disservices, represents a worldwide conservation challenge. The ecosystem services and Ostrom's social–ecological systems ...frameworks have been adopted across natural and social sciences to characterize benefits from nature. Despite their generalizability, individually they do not include explicit tools for addressing the sustainable management of many wildlife populations. For instance, Ostrom's framework does not specifically address competing perspectives on wildlife, whereas the ecosystem services framework provides a limited representation of the social and governance context wherein such competing perspectives are embedded. We developed a unified social–ecological framework of ecosystem disservices and services (SEEDS) that advances both frameworks by explicitly acknowledging the importance of competing wildlife perspectives embedded in the social and governance contexts. The SEEDS framework emulates the hierarchical structure of Ostrom's social–ecological systems, but adds subsystems reflecting heterogeneous stakeholder views and experiences of wildlife‐based services and disservices. To facilitate operationalizing SEEDS and further broader analyses across human–wildlife systems, we devised a list of variables to describe SEEDS subsystems, such as types and level of services and disservices, cost and benefit sharing, and social participation of stakeholders. Steps to implement SEEDS involve engaging local communities and stakeholders to define the subsystems, analyze interactions and outcomes, and identify leverage points and actions to remedy unwanted outcomes. These steps connect SEEDS with other existing approaches in social–ecological research and can guide analyses across systems or within individual systems to provide new insights and management options for sustainable human–wildlife coexistence.
Control de las Compensaciones de los Servicios y Perjuicios Ambientales para Lograr la Coexistencia entre Humanos y Fauna
Resumen
El mantenimiento de las poblaciones silvestres de fauna, las cuales proporcionan servicios y perjuicios, representa un reto para la conservación a nivel mundial. Los servicios ambientales y los marcos de trabajo de los sistemas socio‐ecológicos de Ostrom se han adoptado en la ciencias naturales y sociales para caracterizar los beneficios que proporciona la naturaleza. A pesar de ser generalizables, individualmente no incluyen herramientas explícitas para tratar el manejo sustentable de muchas poblaciones silvestres. Por ejemplo, el marco de trabajo de Ostrom no trata de manera específica las perspectivas rivales sobre fauna, mientras que el marco de trabajo de los servicios ambientales proporciona una representación limitada del contexto social y de gobierno en los que están embebidas dichas perspectivas rivales. Desarrollamos un marco de trabajo socio‐ecológico unificado de servicios y perjuicios ambientales (SEEDS, en inglés) que impulsa ambos marcos de trabajo al reconocer explícitamente la importancia de las perspectivas rivales sobre fauna embebidas en los contextos sociales y de gobierno. El marco de trabajo SEEDS emula la estructura jerárquica de los sistemas socio‐ecológicos de Ostrom, pero añade subsistemas que reflejan la visión y las experiencias heterogéneas que los accionistas tienen sobre los servicios y perjuicios basados en la fauna. Para facilitar la operación de los SEEDS y ampliar los análisis en todos los sistemas humano‐fauna, diseñamos una lista de variables para describir los subsistemas de los SEEDS, como los tipos y niveles de los servicios y perjuicios, el costo y beneficio del reparto, y la participación social de los accionistas. Los pasos para implementar los SEEDS involucran comprometer a las comunidades locales y a los accionistas para que definan los subsistemas, analicen las interacciones y los resultados, e identifiquen los puntos y acciones de ventaja para remediar los resultados no deseados. Estos pasos conectan a los SEEDS con otras estrategias de investigación socio‐ecológica y pueden guiar los análisis a través de varios sistemas o dentro de sistemas individuales para proporcionar nueva información y opciones de manejo para una coexistencia sustentable entre humanos y fauna.
摘要
维持野生生物种群既提供了生态系统服务, 也带来了不良影响, 是世界性的保护挑战。自然科学和社会科学中都采用了生态系统服务和奥斯特罗姆社会‐生态系统框架来表示从自然中获得的收益。虽然它们得到了广泛应用, 但就单一框架而言, 它们并不含有解决许多野生生物种群可持续管理问题的直接工具。例如, 奥斯特罗姆框架没有明确地应对关于野生生物相互冲突的观点, 而生态系统框架也只是对纳入了这些观点的社会和管理方面的内容进行了有限的表述。我们设计了一个统一的生态系统服务及不良影响的社会‐生态学框架 (social‐ecological framework of ecosystem disservices and services, SEEDS), 明确了在社会及管理背景下加入对野生生物的不同观点的重要性, 是对原有的两个框架的发展。这个 SEEDS 框架效法奥斯特罗姆社会‐生态系统的层级结构, 但增加了子系统来反映利益相关者对基于野生生物的服务及不良影响的不同观点和经验。为了促进 SEEDS 框架的实施、推进对人类‐野生生物系统更广泛的分析, 我们设计了一系列变量来描述 SEEDS 的子系统, 如服务和不良影响的类型和等级、成本分担和利益共享、利益相关者的社会参与等。 SEEDS 的实施步骤包括促进当地社区和利益相关者的参与以定义子系统、分析相互作用和结果, 和确定补救不当结果的关键点及行动。这些步骤将 SEEDS 和其它社会‐生态研究中的现有方法建立了联系, 可以指导多系统或单一系统的分析, 为可持续的人类‐野生生物共存提供深入理解和管理措施。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
Article impact statement: Equitable and effective human‐wildlife coexistence requires governing trade‐offs in ecosystem services and disservices across stakeholder groups.
Rewilding complex ecosystems Perino, Andrea; Pereira, Henrique M; Navarro, Laetitia M ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
04/2019, Letnik:
364, Številka:
6438
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The practice of rewilding has been both promoted and criticized in recent years. Benefits include flexibility to react to environmental change and the promotion of opportunities for society to ...reconnect with nature. Criticisms include the lack of a clear conceptualization of rewilding, insufficient knowledge about possible outcomes, and the perception that rewilding excludes people from landscapes. Here, we present a framework for rewilding that addresses these concerns. We suggest that rewilding efforts should target trophic complexity, natural disturbances, and dispersal as interacting processes that can improve ecosystem resilience and maintain biodiversity. We propose a structured approach to rewilding projects that includes assessment of the contributions of nature to people and the social-ecological constraints on restoration.
The potential for megafauna restoration is unevenly distributed across the world, along with the socio‐political capacity of countries to support these restoration initiatives. We show that choosing ...a recent baseline to identify species' indigenous range puts a higher burden for megafauna restoration on countries in the Global South, which also have less capacity to support these restoration initiatives. We introduce the Megafauna Index, which considers large mammal's potential species richness and range area at the country level, to explore how the responsibility for megafauna restoration is distributed across the world according to four scenarios using various temporal benchmarks to define species' indigenous range – current, historical (1500 AD), mid‐Holocene and Pleistocene. We test how the distribution of restoration burden across the world correlates with indicators of conservation funding, human development and governance. Using a recent or historical baseline as a benchmark for restoration puts a higher pressure on African and south‐east Asian countries while lifting the responsibility from the Global North, where extinctions happened a long time ago. When using a mid‐Holocene or Pleistocene baseline, new opportunities arise for megafauna restoration in Europe and North America, respectively, where countries have a higher financial and societal capacity to support megafauna restoration. These results contribute to the debate around benchmarks in rewilding initiatives and the ethical implications of using recent baselines to guide restoration efforts. We suggest that countries from the Global North should reflect on their responsibility in supporting global restoration efforts, by both increasing their support for capacity building in the Global South and taking responsibility for restoring lost megafauna at home.
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